On the one hand, it will of course help curb zerging and just general close-proximity formations.

On the other hand, it will also negatively affect tactical depth and fleet compositions:- Having a mixed fleet of say a dread and 5 small ships won't be as viable anymore - as a unit they may be strong, but if spread too far apart could be off easily. With volatility, they would be forced to be spread apart, lest they get blown up/severely damaged from the dread being killed.

- Facing an enemy with primarily longer max range weapons and a corresponding longer min range, gives the option to attempt to punish such a player by getting into the the min range with your own short range weapons, preferably in numbers. With volatility, this option's viability is decreased, as your ships will not only incur the damage they normally would in trying to position themselves within the min range, but more damage would be incurred as some of your ships blow up en-route, damaging the rest of your squadron, damage incurred by your own ships as they get hit and destroyed by other ships whilst in min range of a few targets and your ships damaged by the explosion of the enemy ships.

- I'm not a huge fan of every ship potentially being a suicide ship.

A lot of my skepticism depends on how it all turns out to be implemented in the game - how often ships blown up, whether all races will have this feature, the final damage/radius numbers etc, but I would personally prefer for AoE weapons to be a deterrent to tight formations as opposed to volatility, as in that way, tight formations would sometimes be the most viable tactic, meaning greater tactical depth.

Dreadnoughts should never die. We want players to retreat if their losing.As we add in more systems like officers, crafting, trade/research and aging ships, retreating will prevent a lot of financial and time losses.

I'm merely playing devil's advocate and looking at how volatility could affect the meta and overall tactical depth. The volatility system appears (or rather now appeared) to have the potential to completely invalidate a whole branch of tactics involving tighter formations from the get-go, regardless of enemy fleet composition and/or weaponry used, ie less tactical depth, but with the different HP pools of SI and HI respectfully and especially considering the much larger HI value, the chance of those tactics being invalidated becomes far less.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out once implemented, as the effect on the meta will of course depend on many variables, one of which being the frequency of ship explosions.

PS the use of 'Dread' in one example was for illustrative purposes - it could be a formation of any larger, volatile ship being escorted by smaller ships.